The Most Beautiful Story from IFLC
Imagine a program, a fantastic celebration where the majority of participants are young. Such a program where young people from different nations and countries come together, heralding to us a future of good days after the difficult times we’ve been through as a world. They do this by presenting to us the story of Prophet Yusuf. In this month’s article, I will briefly tell the story of Prophet Yusuf to our esteemed readers and explain why this story was chosen.
A long time ago, Prophet Yusuf, the youngest son of a family with 12 boys, had a dream one night. In his dream, he saw eleven stars, the sun, and the moon bowing down to him. When he woke up, he told his father, Prophet Yakub, about this dream. His father realized that Yusuf would be someone important in the future and warned him not to tell his brothers about the dream. After this incident, Yakup showed special attention to his son. However, his brothers became jealous of this attention and started planning to kill Yusuf.
One day, they threw him into a deep well and told their father that a wolf had eaten him. Yusuf, alone and thirsty in the well, prayed and was rescued by a caravan passing by three days later. He was sold as a slave in Egypt and bought by a wealthy man named Aziz. Aziz’s wife fell in love with Yusuf, but he rejected her. She accused him falsely, and Yusuf was thrown into prison. He stayed in prison for many years, interpreting dreams for fellow prisoners. When his interpretations turned out to be true, he was released from prison and brought to the palace. He interpreted a dream for the emperor, predicting years of abundance followed by years of famine, and was appointed as the minister of finance. During the years of abundance, Yusuf filled the granaries with provisions and helped the people during the famine. Famine also struck the city where Yusuf’s family lived. His brothers went to Egypt seeking help from the palace. Yusuf recognized them and revealed his identity, forgiving them for their past actions. Yusuf, now a high-ranking official in the palace, invited his family to Egypt, where he reunited with his parents. His eleven brothers bowed down to him. Yusuf turned to his father and said, ‘My father, indeed I have seen [in a dream] eleven stars and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me.’
What we understand from this story is that the struggle between good and evil is a fundamental issue for humanity. This problem has caused suffering throughout history, not only in the present day. The story of Yusuf narrates the struggle between the righteous, representing values such as love, justice, and tolerance, and the wicked, representing selfishness, hatred, and violence. However, for a world filled with true love, we need to discover the conscience that Allah (God) has endowed us with. Because the truth is, our inner conscience never lies to us and shows us the right path.
Lastly, the International Festival of Language and Culture (IFLC), which started as Turkish Olympiads in 2003, has been bringing young people from more than 100 countries together every year through an artistic celebration featuring songs, poems, and dances. In this year’s program, they told the story of Prophet Yusuf and accompanied it with beautiful music and exhilarating dances, creating unforgettable moments and providing solace to weary hearts. The young people who participated in the program put aside the strugles in their lives and bonded with each other with love at the end of the program. I will finish with a poem by Mr. Fethullah Gülen that was sung in the program;
“One day, the sun will rise anyway; Light will shower on the surroundings anew; Every nook and corner, every hill and dale, Light will come and overcome the darkness…”